News / Behind the Scenes

This holiday season, Letterform Archive staff members bring you their favorite gift ideas from our shop. From letterpress postcards printed by hand to colorful design books and cozy, type-forward blankets, we’ve got unique ideas for every type and design lover on your list.

Every purchase you make helps support the Archive’s education, exhibition, and preservation programs. Dive into our favorites and find something for everyone you love.

Order your gifts now! December 13 is the last day to ensure domestic delivery by December 25!

Do you love good design? Do you believe the world needs more inspiration? Bring your love of high quality printing and book production to a nonprofit organization that is growing rapidly because we inspire people every day. Letterform Archive is seeking an experienced and exceptional prepress and production management professional to support our ongoing growth in publishing. Reporting to the publisher, the production manager is responsible for prepress color correction and file preparation, and managing the production process from exploratory quotes to finished books.

We just approved printer’s proofs for the second issue of The Occasional. Didn’t get the first edition in 2019? Consider it an annual report, only much less annual, and much more interesting.

The story of graphic design is traditionally written by award winners, major brands, and big names. Their work is heralded in trade journals and design annuals, established as canon in college text books, and archived in museums and special collections. Meanwhile, the wider world of design — which can have as much impact on its audience — goes unrecorded. This includes objects that are widely seen but under-appreciated, or hyper-local and lesser-known, but no less remarkable. And that work is often designed by underrepresented or marginalized people.

Letterform Archive has one of the world’s best collections of typographic history. We house over 60,000 objects aggregated from various sources and donors with overlapping interests. This often yields multiple copies of a book or print, and there are now hundreds of duplicates to be deaccessioned. Over the last five years we held several small sales, particularly of reference books and type foundry ephemera, but we reserved the rarest gems for a moment when we could offer them all together in a globally accessible auction.

Like many of you sheltering at home, our team is seeing a lot of each other within the now-familiar grid of video chat rectangles. We love getting a peek at everyone’s home office, but we also miss being surrounded by the Archive and its countless bits of inspiration and delight.

So, as an addition to our Cabin F(or)ever kit, we’re pleased to bring you our first batch of background images selected from objects in the Online Archive, each carefully cropped and edited for Zoom. Now you can use our periodical wall to visualize your ideal home library, wallpaper your room with Paul Rand, furnish your apartment with type from Caslon’s 1844 specimen, live inside an issue of Emigre, or do “some blue sky thinking” with Martin Venezky.

Despite pandemic restrictions, the Archive’s Collections Team is actively (and safely) making our new space feel like home.

As you may have heard, we moved to a new space in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood in September. Like a lot of things this year, it didn’t come easy, but it feels like a fresh start. At our original location in Potrero Hill, we were just plain out of room — for desks, for books, for collections care projects. Despite turning every corner and closet available into bookcases, our shelves were overflowing. We had to keep incoming collections in boxes after processing them, because we didn’t have a linear inch to spare.